2 - The Regime of the Streets: Renewal and Riots, 1910–1926

Summary

Around the mid-nineteenth century, some of Calcutta's most densely populated bustees were located in the area bound by Cotton Street in the north, Canning Street in the south, Halliday Street in the east, and Brabourne Road in the west. These bustees were inhabited predominantly by poor Muslim tenants, but some rich Muslim Momin and Sarti merchants from Bombay also lived among them in more substantial dwelling houses. Although there had been a steady displacement of Muslims from the area because of slum clearance from the 1880s onwards, and affluent Muslim merchant families were also losing their presence in the area's trade profile, the construction of Harrison Road by the Municipal Corporation in the 1890s precipitated an extraordinary transformation of these neighbourhoods. This dense settlement of the city's poor turned into prime urban property almost overnight.

Buoyancy in the locality's real estate market brought on by the Harrison Road Scheme led to dramatic demographic upheavals in the heart of the city, thus creating conditions for social conflicts. Around this time, the city was also witnessing the emergence of mass nationalist and working-class politics, and the ways in which that impacted the nature and popular perceptions of urban space. In this chapter, I intend to show how the discourses and practices of property (shaped by colonial civic institutions) on the one hand and mobilizational politics on the other interfaced in the making of the urban milieu of early-twentieth-century Calcutta.

The Story of the Mosque near Harrison Road

In the late 1840s, Din Mahomed, a coachman of the wealthy Muslim city merchant Haji Zakaria, had built a small mosque in the southern portion of Armenian Street with his fellow syces and coachmen. A bustee of poor Muslim tenants, covering approximately 3 bighas of land, was located right opposite Din Mahomed's Mosque, on the north side on Amratola Street. In 1890, the Municipal Corporation initiated the construction of the new Harrison Road in the vicinity of the bustee. Drawn to the changing prospects of this area on account of its proximity to the projected new road, in 1902 or 1903, a Marwari firm, Gopi Ram Bhagat Ram, and a wealthy Muslim merchant, A. M. Ishabhai, bought over one half of the bustee each, for a total price of 110,000 rupees. Bhagat Ram built a four-storeyed mansion for his family on his share of the plot.